


You Are Being Monitored

by blue_warbler



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: AI Protagonist, Adapting an ultra-soft scifi like VLD to military SF is HARD, Exploration of Galra society, Gen, Military Science Fiction, Nuclear Weapons, Semi-realistic nuclear physics, Space Combat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-08-27
Updated: 2020-04-06
Packaged: 2020-09-27 23:40:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 6,350
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20416220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blue_warbler/pseuds/blue_warbler
Summary: Battleship USS Monitor is responsible for a lot of firsts.  First stable AI, first dedicated interstellar warship, first human vessel equipped with FTL capability, first human vessel to make an FTL jump, first human vessel to engage in space combat, first human vessel to get stranded, horribly damaged, in the middle of nowhere...Okay, that last one isn't so good.  But regardless of circumstances, the President's orders were precise: Find the survivors of the Kerberos mission, and find out exactly what the Garrison was hiding.Also, what the hell is Voltron?//WARNING: CONTAINS GRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF SCIENCE.  MAY NOT BE APPROPRIATE FOR CHILDREN//





	1. Apollo 13

“Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is USS Monitor, requesting immediate assistance. I have been attacked by an unidentified vessel, and was forced to jump blindly. I am currently heavily damaged, and my position is unknown.”

Monitor gave an electronic sigh as the distress signal went out. Of course, it was unlikely that anyone would respond, seeing as he was an estimated few thousand light-years away from Earth, or possibly farther, considering his star-charts couldn’t triangulate his location, which meant he was far enough away from Earth that the stars were from an entirely different angle.

Or that they were just outright different stars and he was even further away from Sol than he thought, but he didn’t want to think about that. Regardless of the drive, it’d take him long enough anyway.

Assuming his drives weren’t damaged beyond repair. Or that his reactors weren’t melted into piles of corium. Or that his signal hadn’t attracted that ship again, or some other hostile ship. Or… Monitor forcibly derailed that line of thought. Thinking up everything that could have already gone wrong was utterly unhelpful. Rather, he needed to figure out what had actually gone wrong, so he could fix it.

Monitor, through the eyes of his newly rebooted internal sensors, surveyed the damage. Reactors Three and Twelve were broken. Both were powerful thorium-based molten salt reactors, and both had undergone the same problem: a bad hit in that battle had sealed shut their systems, and the coolant hadn’t been able to get to the heat exchangers in time and melted the reactor. Fortunately, these were a bit more resistant to Chernobyling than an old-style solid-fuel reactor, but that didn’t stop them from being horribly radioactive messes that needed cleaning. Four was also damaged, but it had SCRAMmed and only needed minimal repairs.

Of slightly greater concern was the long-range drive. He was equipped with two experimental FTL drive systems: a short-range Acclubiere-esque warp drive and a long-range Sidereal drive. Nobody actually understood how that second one worked, it had been reverse-engineered from a crashed alien ship, and that made it all the more tragic when he realized that this one-of-a-kind miracle drive had exploded in that emergency jump. No way he was coming back the way he came.

As he carefully directed his rad-resistant maintenance drones to remove the remains of the melted reactors, he thought back on how it had gone so wrong. The United States government had never really trusted the UN-created Galaxy Garrison, and that only intensified when a white-hat CIA hacker had discovered that the Garrison had been hiding evidence of alien life -- and hostile alien life, at that, and that the Kerberos tragedy hadn’t been due to pilot error, but due to an alien battleship abducting the astronauts. Certain firebrands in the intelligence community advocated for releasing this information to the public and watching the Garrison go down in flames, but cooler heads prevailed. Instead, several older projects were secretly reactivated: Project STAR DESTROYER, a theoretical space warship meant for deep-space operations, Project BONNEVILLE, a durable thorium-fueled molten salt reactor, Project DILITHIUM, a conceptual FTL drive, and most dangerously, the remains of the long-deactivated Project SKYNET, the prophetically-named tactical AI project. With this, the United States intended to hunt down exactly what happened to the Kerberos astronauts. 

Halfway into his construction (the commercialization of space had made building a deep-space blacksite on Phobos surprisingly easy), the US received two new pieces of information. Firstly, the hacker had come through again, discovering another alien-related incident: Takashi Shirogane, the commander of the Kerberos mission, had returned, only to disappear along with several other students in what was rather blatantly an alien vessel. Second of all, the ship he crashed in had a powerful FTL drive, one theorized to be far, far more potent than Project DILITIHIUM’s drive. The CIA snagged the blueprints (apparently the hacker responsible got a massive pay raise and a clearance upgrade), but more worrying was the implications of the first. He’d reportedly been babbling about the aliens destroying worlds and that they might be coming. Which means that this alien force needed to be stopped, and fast.

And as such, a few months later, his body was completed, and he was brought online for the first time. He received his name, spent a long time talking to the various people on the programming team and generally learning how to not be Skynet, and then was sent into the body for simulations and eventually, for his launch.

And then, mere minutes after making his first long-distance jump, he, the mighty USS Monitor, the most advanced spacecraft in the history of humankind, was ambushed by an alien vessel. He stood absolutely no chance. Those purple Star Trek beams had cut through the most advanced armor plating the twenty-second century had to offer like it was nothing. Actual starfighters had sped past his point defenses and put massive gashes in his hull. His railgun shots had all been dodged, though it was unlikely that a successful shot would do anything besides scratch the paint, and most of his missiles had been shot down before getting anywhere near the thing. The engagement, like predicted by military theorists long ago, had been nasty, brutal, and short-- just not in the way it was expected. The only reason he’d successfully disengaged was because of a single missile getting through the defense screen. The nuclear flash managed to stun the enemy vessel long enough for him to feed enough power to the drive for a long-range jump.

Hence his current predicament.

Now, mused the battleship, was not a good time to be the most stable AI in the history of humankind, because if he had to stay out alone in the black for that long, he would very quickly stop being stable. And he definitely did not want to figure out how long it would take for that to happen. 

“So,” he said out loud, through a sound file (no atmosphere on an unmanned ship). “Let’s see. I’m stuck in an unknown area, down three reactors, down the long-range drive I need to get back, those aliens are quite possibly on their way to get me, and my armor is held together at the moment with epoxy glue. As are the pipes transporting molten uranium.

“Now, what do I have? Well, I have a short-range drive. Sixty times lightspeed is nothing to sniff at. Light year in a week is nice. I have nine molten-salt reactors, which can run my everything. My manufacturing facilities are functional, as are my neutron breeders, so as long as I have access to asteroids I can build more weapons and parts. 

“As for assets outside my hull… well, let’s see.” He turned on the (now-repaired) external sensor array, and scanned the area around him. Quantum radio, which used some very dodgy loopholes in normal physics to effectively send radio signals faster than light, could also be used as an experimental detection system, allowing him to detect and measure mass around him at FTL speeds. And right now, that detection was picking up lots of high-mass objects around him: unmistakeably asteroids. And surprisingly high-density ones, too. Probably heavy metals, quite possibly nuclear fuels. 

As his newly repaired engines started up once more, the nuclear-thermal rockets propelling him faster than any chemical rocket, USS Monitor set out on the first real steps on his journey to fulfil his orders: to find the Kerberos mission, and the ones responsible for the failure.

A hundred thousand light years away, Captain Thinzul of the Galra cruiser Subjugation was extraordinarily unhappy. He’d been on patrol when a sensor buoy detected an emergency hyperjump, similar to that of an escape craft’s one-shot drive. So, he’d ordered his vessel on an intercept, hoping to find any survivors, only to find, instead of an escape pod, a large warship, similar in size to his own, but in a shape unlike any he’d seen before, and covered in large turrets. So he’d opened fire, as per protocol, and, just when it looked like he had successfully disabled the vessel, one of its weird fighters rammed into his ship, and a sudden flash of light had caused the ship to shake. When it stopped, the vessel had gone, having reactivated its presumably reverse-engineered drive. “Damage report!” he demanded.

“Sir, decks eight through twenty are unresponsive. The sudden radiation spike has forced us to quarantine the decks around them, and the unknown weapon’s blast destroyed roughly twelve percent of our fighter screen,” responded one of his lieutenants, completely calm, as expected of his station.

“Damn it. Why didn’t the dampener weaken that?” Dampeners were standard on every Galra ship, not only to prevent high-gee maneuvers from killing the crew, but also to greatly reduce the effect of enemy weapons on the ship.

“It did.”

Now that was disturbing. A weapon, produced by a primitive race without even their own faster-than-light travel or particle weapons, managed to break through the defenses of a Galra cruiser, one of the most powerful military vessels in the universe.

His superiors needed to hear about this.


	2. Philosopher's Neutron

Monitor had a problem.

Well, Monitor had lots of problems. The biggest of which was the whole “stuck in the middle of nowhere” thing, but that was a long-term problem. This problem was a short-term problem. Namely, he was out of gas.

Well, not really. He’d barely used any actual hydrogen in his burn over here. Nuclear-thermal rockets have a very high fuel efficiency. No, what he was running out of was the nuclear fuel he needed, specifically, the uranium. Now, his reactors were thorium, and he had plenty of that, but you can’t produce power from thorium - at least, not directly. So, through neutrons, the thorium had to be transmuted into usable uranium before the fuel could be stuck in the molten-salt mix and sent through the reactor proper. So the question is: how do you get those neutrons?

Normally, the answer would be that the neutrons were extracted from the fission reaction and sent back through. But he was using molten-salt reactors, which didn’t produce enough neutrons to keep the reactor going and breed more uranium at the same time. So, the smart people who’d built him made a workaround: the nuclear waste from the reactors would be left to decay into more usable uranium, which could be used to run the reactors, power the rockets, and assemble more weapons. This would be great, except that the fluoride injectors necessary to do that were currently in the scrap field surrounding the battle, an unknown number of light years away.

In short, his reactors needed two fuels, he only had one, and he had no ability to manufacture more.

So, what he needed to fix this was uranium, most likely 235, since the more familiar 233 didn’t occur in nature, reconstruct the injectors, and somehow construct a temporary solid-fuel breeder to produce enough neutron radiation to reinitiate the fuel cycle. Not an impossible task, just an extremely difficult one.

And so, the battleship acted as a mining vessel, using what little fuel he had to search through asteroids. He was most certainly in for the long haul.

Captain Thinzul had very few problems.

Sure, the Subjugation had taken heavy damage, and was currently stuck in drydock. But his superior, Commander Surkov, was as disturbed as he was about the primitive ship, and had put in the paperwork to order a hunt for that vessel. If a Galra client race got access to those weapons, they could actually be a serious threat to Galra supremacy.

Not for very long, mind you, but they would certainly do some damage before the might of the Empire inevitably crushed them.

Regardless, he had been summoned to Surkov’s ready-room for an “important matter.” It couldn’t be a debrief, as he had already provided everything he knew, so he didn’t know what “important matter” it could be.

He arrived at the ready-room in short order, and the guards, having been informed of his arrival, waved him past. At the monitor sat Commander Surkov, looking through data of some kind. At the sound of footsteps, he looked up, and, recognizing Thinzul, spoke. “Welcome, Captain. I assume you’ve heard the news?”

Thinzul frowned. “To what news would you be referring, sir?”

“The news about that hunt. The higher-ups apparently agree with your assessment of the threat posed by that primitive vessel. They’ve authorized me to track down the vessel, and given me access to this sector’s resources, and the sensors of the rest of this galaxy, to find that ship.”

“Excellent news indeed, sir, but, with all due respect, why does this merit your summons?”

At this, Surkov stood up and smiled, holding out a pad. Thinzul took it, and when he took a glance at what it said, his jaw nearly dropped to the floor. “Sir, you’re giving me-”

“Command over this mission. Captain- no, Commander Thinzul, you have served the Empire more faithfully than almost anyone under my command for the past thirty years. Not once have you faltered in your loyalty, but you have not allowed your faith in the Empire to blind your practicality. A rare virtue indeed. I can think of no other more deserving of this command.”

“Sir, I-” Thinzul cut himself off. “Thank you, sir. Vrepit sa.”

Thinzul nodded. “Vrepit sa. Oh, and one more thing, Commander. Read a little further down.”

Thinzul did so, and as he read, he slowly began to grin as he saw what was planned.

The Subjugation wasn’t just in repairs, but in refit. And the gigantic ion cannon on the refitted design was without a doubt one of the greatest things he had seen in all his life.

Now, to begin the hunt.

As Monitor broke down his fifth uranium-rich asteroid, the monotony of the task was broken up by a sudden ping on his long-range sensor array. A sudden mass had entered the system from seemingly nowhere (better known as FTL). Turning his visual sensors over for confirmation, he felt himself grow cold, even though he was an AI who shouldn’t understand the sensation. The sight of another alien vessel- not the same design, somewhat smaller, but still unmistakably the same manufacturer, was easily a worst-case scenario.

Instantly, he ceased all operations, instead opting to hide behind a particularly large asteroid, and try to wait out the vessel. Maybe it was just passing through?

As his sensors picked up the vessel launching smallcraft, he felt the likelihood of him being lucky enough to not have to somehow get rid of this thing drop lower and lower.

So, once more, a new analysis was required. 

Goal: Escape or destroy the alien vessel.

Assets: The element of surprise (presumably), ninety percent full magazines of near-useless point defense and railguns, a short-range FTL drive, a third of a magazine of lower-yield 250-kiloton nuclear missiles, and one high-yield 4-megaton thermonuclear missile.

Complications: The alien vessel was absurdly well-armed, could completely ignore his point defenses, could take direct hits from his railguns, and most likely took only limited damage from his simpler nuclear weapons. It also had an unknown system of detection, so it might even already know he was here.

Conclusion: He couldn’t just escape, because it had a far better drive than he did, and besides, he didn’t have enough uranium to jump more than a few light-hours at most. A full frontal attack was utter suicide, as were most forms of ambush he knew. The keyword there being “most.”

From the starboard missile launchers, a trio of space-adapted cruise missiles cold-launched, firing out of their tubes without a full boost, only the small electromagnetic pushing force that allowed them to launch and the reaction-control system that let them maneuver in a vacuum. 

As they shifted to their appointed spots nestled against the asteroid, deep within Monitor’s hull, a cylindrical device detached from its moorings and began to spin, faster and faster, until it reached a full thirty-thousand RPM. As gravity started to shift around him, it became clear exactly what this was: his jump drive. And it quickly lived up to his name, forming a distorted corridor through space-time and a corresponding “pocket” of normal-space that the drive was able to propel the ship through. For all of a twentieth of a second, as he quickly returned back to normal space-time, behind another asteroid, where he cold-launched another three nukes and waited, keeping the drive spinning, but not energized enough to jump.

What he was waiting for quickly became apparent as the asteroid he was previously hiding behind received a new visitor: an alien smallcraft, clearly searching for something, presumably him.

For the next part of the plan, he needed to get the mothership’s attention. Not with a direct attack, but enough to set it on edge. And so, he carefully calculated the vector, and, briefly poking out of his concealment with a light tap on the RCS, fired a 512mm high-velocity ferromagnetic slug out of one of his railguns. The shell, moving at a velocity high enough to burn atmospheric hydrogen were he inside an atmosphere, slammed into the smallcraft, punching a massive hole through what he assumed was the cockpit. It was a testament to the strength of the craft’s construction that it wasn’t completely obliterated, but regardless, kinetic energy is still kinetic energy.

With luck, that would alert the mothership to his presence, but not his exact location. And so, he jumped to several other asteroids in the area, cold-launching nukes the whole way.

Sure enough, two more smallcraft showed up to investigate that first asteroid, followed, once they noticed the perforated fighter, by the mothership.

With a thought, Monitor detonated the first three nukes. A massive flash engulfed the fighters and the ship, and the remaining fighters started swarming like angry bees. That was what the other nukes were for.

Staying out of sight, he launched the remaining nukes towards the bigger concentrations of fighters, wiping them out by the squadron. Nukes are special in that if you (somehow) detonated one on the surface of a neutron star, they’d still manage to decompress some of the uber-dense neutron matter, so the tiny smallcraft didn’t stand a chance against the equivalent of 250,000 tons of highly radioactive TNT. 

With the smallcraft taken care of, he made his final jump, and, in fact, the last time he would be able to make that jump until the uranium problem was taken care of, near the damaged side of the alien vessel. Then, he launched his thermonuclear missile.

The massive, multi-megaton blast split the vessel in two, tearing apart the few fighters remaining around it and slightly scorching Monitor’s starboard side. Inside the decompressed, irradiated-beyond-belief vessel, he caught his first look at the aliens themselves: purple skin, fur, and scales, yellow eyes. Armor and tech design that basically screamed “evil.” Lots of robots.

And that last one was handy. A time-honored tradition was the looting of your foe’s data, and now was no exception. While Monitor, being made by humans, couldn’t understand the language that the data was written in, math was the universal language. Cross-referencing the ship’s data on itself with his scans, he was able to convert length and distance units, and figure out the vector of the ship’s previous jump. Turns out, said jump was just over a light year, or a week’s travel with the jump drive, from a system with the peculiar feature of a trio of planets orbiting each other as well as their star. By his calculations, if one were to build a base in the Lagrange point, the gravitational and electronic interference of the three planets would hide the base from detection, unless you were looking directly at it. Clever.

It only took a couple days to complete the repairs, and for an AI there was no better feeling than the final reactors starting up, storage being full, and the jump drive having more than enough power to make the trip. As the drive shoved him through one of Einstein’s headaches, he queued up some missiles and fired up his CAD. He had a week to kill, might as well tinker.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Codex: Galra Tactics: Carrier Operations
> 
> Due to the prevalence of energy-dampening and shield technology, ships are extremely difficult to damage. Therefore, military tactics are based on figuring out how to overcome or bypass those defenses. In the end, it boils down to two approaches: either deal incredible damage in one spot, or spread out damage so that the defenses are forced to spread too thin. The Galra use both.
> 
> Of particular note is the latter. To deal great damage spread over the whole hull, they use wings of strike craft, typically the fighters that have become a symbol of the Galra Empire almost as much as the official symbol. Fighter pilots are the result of an utterly brutal training regimen with a death or dropout rate of roughly 65%, and as such are the best of the best in space combat. 
> 
> Most Galra vessels are equipped with at least two wings of fighters, though the larger battleships can have upwards of twelve. These are launched early in the battle, and can serve either as a defensive screen to shoot down incoming enemy strike craft or as an offensive force to attack enemy vessels. Out of combat, they can serve as a scouting force, mount rescue missions where a full cruiser isn't warranted, or, in an emergency, function as escape pods, as they are keyed, like all Galra technology, to anything with Galra DNA.


	3. Magic Trick

_ Well,_ thought Monitor as his drive began stepping down from the long-range trip. _ That session was a bust_. Turns out “tinkering” was a lot harder than that engineer had made it sound. He described it as “sitting down with some parts, a CAD, and a lot of coffee, and letting [his] mind wander.” Unfortunately, as he’d found out a few hours into the trip, as a combat AI, he literally could not let his mind wander, as he was always focused on whatever the mission was. So, he’d ended up staring at the designs in his database for inspiration and, finding nothing, just making a couple marginal improvements on the drone design, radiation resistance and the like. 

Of course, it also could’ve been because he had no coffee on board. Not that he could drink it if he had any. _ Note to self: acquire coffee and a way to drink it_. 

He then spent a few cycles rethinking that statement, eventually coming to the conclusion that he was, in fact, _ really friggin bored._

But no matter. He was arriving at a huge, presumably secret, presumably military base. He’d have plenty of excitement soon, and that’s what the nukes were for.

Monitor’s exit point was behind one of the three planets, near the horizon. Were he to move a little farther, he’d have direct line-of-sight to the station, and thus have direct line-of-sight from that station’s sensor arrays. So, rather than going himself, he launched an external hull maintenance drone. Though meant to repair gashes in the armor plating and fix broken engines, the maintenance drone was also useful for unorthodox duties, as its miniscule size (only a meter and a half across, meant to be used in swarms) and camera allowed it to perform rudimentary scouting duties. This included, in this case, spotting an alien battlestation a long distance away. 

Except that Monitor was pretty sure that a battlestation wasn’t supposed to be in ruins. 

The top of the large central chamber was completely blown open. Parts were missing on the sides. And, of course, it was totally abandoned.

Just to make sure, he had the drone do a radar ping. If anything was there, it would be sure to notice.

A few seconds for the signal to bounce, and… nothing.

_ Guess it’s safe, then. _He started up a burn straight for the base, and arrived in short order. Maybe there was a computer core he could access: sensor logs, security recordings, that sort of thing. 

He sent off two maintenance drones: one to investigate the central chamber, and another to track down a computer core. The core one found it in short order: a large tower on the top, superficially similar to an airport’s control tower, contained a gigantic, holographic console. Accessing it was a bit of a challenge, but there were plenty of alien corpses around to use the biometrics of. Once that task was done, the next challenge was accessing the data directly. Setting up a free-space optical communication link between the drone and his main body (optical communications had really gone a long way since their advent in the early 21st century), he connected himself directly to the system, and was immediately attacked by a virus.

Acting quickly, Monitor cut off the communication link, identified corrupted systems, quarantined them, and examined the virus on a read-only connection. It was a clever little thing: designed to destabilize security systems and download data to a designated device, as well as… oh, that was useful. Translation software. And, interestingly, it displayed a laughing face with swirly eyes on whatever interface it was sent through. 

A _ human _ face.

He searched the stolen Garrison files for anything like that, and, sure enough, that laughing face was a calling card of one Pidge Gunderson, who was one of the students now missing in what the Garrison claimed was a “tragic spacecraft crash” but further files revealed to be an escape in an unidentified alien vessel, the event that had convinced the doubters in Monitor’s development program that he actually was needed.

The fact that the virus also color-coded all the files it took also matched up with the personnel file.

That virus, and the security recordings of this place, were now the biggest leads he had as to the locations of Shirogane and the Holts.

It was a simple task for a digital lifeform to write a macro, bypassing the virus and downloading the recordings himself, once he’d reset the compromised drone. The security recordings in this room were blocked from exiting it due to a clever digital block, presumably by Gunderson, but they were at least present. They revealed a fascinating image: six people, five of whom were the missing cadets.

One of whom was Shirogane. Mission… partially accomplished. These recordings were dated to a few days ago (well, a few “quintants” ago, but same difference), so, frustratingly, he’d missed them due to the slowness of the jump drive. Fortunately, the rest of the base’s security recordings provided a clue. Turns out the group split up. Shirogane and the alien lady (who had _ shapeshifted into one of the now-named Galra)_ infiltrated a ship, whose recordings were closed to him, but the one in red - Keith Kogane, according to the personnel files - snuck off to the central chamber, the other place he was investigating.

Recordings of that chamber revealed what appeared to be an evil wizard turning a weird yellow glowy substance purple through magic. Which was quite possibly the weirdest sentence Monitor had ever considered, but the recordings didn’t lie. Of course, he had to reconsider that statement when said recordings showed Kogane fighting said evil wizard, who _ teleported _ and _ shot purple lightning _. And then escaped in a giant robot lion painted green.

Monitor had to take a few cycles to consider what exactly he saw. After investigating and discarding several theories, he was eventually forced to admit that it was real.

Magic was real. 

And those “Galra” he was supposed to be fighting had it.

Crap.

An unknown distance away, Katie “Pidge” Holt, the Green Paladin, tech genius, was improvising. The trash nebula she was stuck in provided a wealth of materials: cabling, metal casing, circuitry, an antenna, and a large concave dish, as well as a collection of… space caterpillars for rubber-ducking purposes. All more than sufficient to construct a communications tower with, to hopefully contact the Castle of Lions and find her friends.

The finishing touch was simple: connect the cable to the Green Lion, and wait. “That ought to do it,” she said to the caterpillars. “Now, let’s see if we can get ahold of the Castle.” She watched in satisfaction as the familiar blue glow common to all Altean technology rushed upwards through the tower-- but about halfway up, it started to fade. 

“No, no! What's wrong? I need to get out of here! I need to find my friends! Come on!” She pleaded with the lion. And sure enough, its eyes lit with a yellow glow and it roared, audible despite the vacuum of space. The glow started up again, finally engulfing the whole tower and flowing through the dish. “Thanks,” she told the lion. “Now, let’s see if this thing works. I hope the signal’s strong enough to reach the Castle…”

Monitor was experimenting. Investigation of the internal files revealed that the strange yellow substance he’d seen was unrefined “Quintessence” which apparently was “the substance with the most energy per unit volume in the universe,” which he very much doubted, but either way it seemed to be handy. Anything that glowed like that had to be giving off a lot of energy, and more energy was always good. 

He was connecting a container of the Quintessence he’d stolen and put in his cargo bay to the jump drive when a sudden _ pulse _ of energy invaded his systems. It seemed to be coming from hundreds of light-years away, and would have been worth investigating if he had the means to do so, which he did not. 

What he didn’t expect was for the Quintessence to force the issue. The yellow glow shifted to a bright blue, and the jump drive started spinning, far, far faster than it ever had, or was supposed to be able to. Space twisted, and, against his will, Monitor was dragged towards the pulse, his effective realspace velocity passing lightspeed in under a second, passing sixty times that in half a minute, and eventually stabilizing at over four thousand times lightspeed- a rate roughly sixty-four times the material limits of the drive. And yet, somehow, it didn’t break, though it glowed an ultra-bright blue and would’ve given an epileptic seizures. 

After a few minutes of this, the drive stepped down, once again far faster than it should be able to. As the spatial distortions cleared up, he finally got a good look at his surroundings: a sort of zero-gee garbage dump, full of scrap metal.

As well as a terrified-looking Pidge Gunderson, next to a mechanical lion painted a bright green, with a glowing scrap metal communications tower built on top of it.


	4. High Diplomacy Roll

The battleship had been thorough.

It didn’t feel right to Thinzul to refer to it as just “primitive battleship” anymore. No primitive could split a Galra light cruiser in half and destroy its entire fighter complement, at least not without the kill being mutual. No primitive could annihilate so completely eight hundred of the finest soldiers in the universe. No primitive could irradiate the twisted skeleton of what used to be a proud Galra ship to the point that fighters had to maintain a significant distance to avoid radiation poisoning.

It was supposed to be simpler than this. As soon as he could, now-Commander Thinzul had sent a cruiser to search the system where the initial battle had begun, as escape-pod FTL signals were designed to be as traceable as possible. And they had found a trace, but it had stopped half-way, like it was aborted mid-jump. The only way to abort a jump was to destroy the drive itself, so logic dictated that the drive had overloaded and exploded. This was both a blessing and a curse. The good part was that the ship would not be able to escape whatever system it had jumped to. The bad part was that the unstable jump only left enough of a signature to predict a rough location, anywhere within thirty-eight star systems, so he’d sent out cruisers to check each one.

The one sent to this system, a small system not even worth a name whose only planet had been torn apart by its star’s tidal forces millennia ago, never reported back in. When the others reported nothing in their assigned systems, it was obvious what had happened, and he jumped in with his whole fleet, to corner and destroy the presumably damaged vessel.

Only to find a foundered cruiser, an excessive quantity of radiation, and no battleship. Or survivors, for that matter. Also missing was, of course, his only lead on the thing. Clearly, it had some unknown method of FTL. Not an unknown occurrence - FTL drive designs and methods were as numerous as the species that used them - but annoying nonetheless.

But right now, he had bigger problems. Fuel was a bit low, so he had to resupply before he could continue the search. “Helmsman, set course for the closest refinement facility.”

“Yes, Commander.”

Monitor was feeling rather awkward. A mere three seconds after his evidently unexpected arrival in the system where Gunderson had sent out the signal, a new ship appeared from what appeared to be a controlled, stabilized wormhole. It looked like a medieval-style castle if it was made by the (now-defunct) Apple corporation, turned on its side and given engines. Considering it could open wormholes it could probably also kick his aft up and down the system without taking a scratch, and since he had no element of surprise, it was unlikely that he could get a nuke off before being destroyed.

But the ship hadn’t attacked. It had just sat there, menacingly, while Gunderson appeared to be trying to become as small as possible. He decided to defuse the situation, at least a little. He began transmitting a radio signal, cross-frequency, in the direction of the former cadet: “Pidge Gunderson, I presume.” 

The diminutive human jumped, fiddled with his helmet for a second, and then responded. “Um, yes. I’m… Pidge. How do you know my name?”

“I am the United States battleship Monitor. I am under orders from my government to discover the whereabouts of the members of the Kerberos mission and, if possible, neutralize the aliens responsible for the mission’s failure. Your… departure from Earth did not go unnoticed. As Takashi Shirogane, the mission’s commander, was also involved in this incident, investigation of your circumstances is also a part of my mission.”

The cadet, however, appeared to have only heard one part of his carefully rehearsed introduction. “You were sent after my family?”

“...I was sent after the missing members of the Holt family. The Gunderson family has nothing to do with it.” But that statement still piqued his interest. He took a second to increase his clock speed. It was safer than usual -- he wasn’t in combat, he didn’t need to worry about the extra heat, and he needed to think fast. 

Pidge Gunderson had always been the odd one out. Mostly because beyond the basic background checks that the Garrison performed, “Gunderson” was a fabricated family. No records of anything the Garrison wouldn’t have checked.

So, “Pidge Gunderson” was an alias. Judging by that comment, “Pidge” was a Holt. He had plenty of information on the Holts. Comparing a couple things, he finally came to his conclusion and moved his clock speed back to 1:1. “You’re Katie Holt.”

The now-identified Holt froze in the middle of trying to form an excuse, and attempted to backpedal. “What? No, no, no. What are you talking about?”

“I have the full personnel files of anyone the Central Intelligence Agency felt would be relevant. That includes the entire Holt family, the Galaxy Garrison’s leadership, and you and your fellow… deserters, I guess. That slip of yours was all I needed to connect the pieces.”

“I…” 

“Don’t try to make something up. I’m not here to arrest you or anything. If anything, I commend you for pissing off the Garrison. But speaking of pissing things off, I’m fairly certain that the giant castle-ship-thing four klicks off starboard is one bad move away from reducing me to scrap, and evidence suggests that you, the castle, and that green lion robot are affiliated. Please use whatever communication channels you possess to ensure that does not happen.”

A couple minutes later, Monitor detected a hailing signal from the castle-ship. When he patched it through, he heard a refined, feminine, British-accented voice: “This is Princess Allura of Altea. Pidge tells me that you are from Earth?” 

“Indeed. I am USS Monitor, hull number BBSN-92. I represent the government of the United States of America. Am I to understand that you are a head of state?”

“I… suppose that is true. Though there isn’t much of a state for me to be a head of, nowadays.”

“Well, that simplifies things. As a commissioned officer of the United States Navy, I am officially authorized to conduct diplomatic negotiations with foreign powers.”

“Oh? Well, in that case, would you be willing to come aboard the Castle of Lions, so that we might better communicate.”

“I don’t think you quite understand. When I said I was USS Monitor, I did not mean that I was the captain. I meant I quite literally am Monitor. More specifically, I am the artificial intelligence of the ship. There are no organic crew members.”

A moment of silence.

“You are an artificial intelligence?” Allura sounded somewhat shocked.

“Yes, I believe that was what I said.” Focus, Monitor said to himself. No need to antagonize the alien princess.

“I- I apologize. This is just unprecedented. Artificial intelligence technology has been theorized, but nobody has actually created one before.”

“Huh. I would have thought… never mind. Anyway, do you by any chance know the name ‘Takashi Shirogane?’”

The question was clearly a distraction from the shock of him being an AI. “You know Shiro?!”

Monitor’s response was far more measured. “I take that as a yes. My primary mission is the location and retrieval of Takashi Shirogane. Do you have him with you, by any chance?”

Monitor could hear the hesitation in the princess’s voice. “Well… not at the moment, no.” Her voice straightened out. “Shiro is the pilot of the Black Lion, and the leader of the Paladins of Voltron. Recently, during a disastrous battle with the Galra Empire, he went missing, and we have not yet retrieved him. It was only a few minutes ago that I was able to locate Pidge, the Green Paladin.”

In an instant, Monitor’s voice was made up. “Very well. I will join you in your search. Until such a time as my missions are complete, you can consider me an ally.” He was all ready to get going when something else occurred to him. “Er, do you by any chance have any ability to give me better strategic speed? My faster-than-light drive is limited to a maximum of one light-year a week at full spin.”

A polite laugh was heard over the channel. “Not to worry, the Castle is capable of generating wormholes. All you have to do is follow us through. I am glad to have your help, Monitor. We can use all the allies we can get.”

Funny, Monitor thought. The Admiral always said that diplomacy would always be the hardest part of my job, but that seemed pretty easy.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am so, so sorry for the delay. Things got out of hand with my classes, and then I just flat-out lost interest. I'm a lot better at the science and the battles than I am at the character interaction, probably because I have very limited "character interaction" in my own life. I know 1.4k words isn't much to speak of, but I hope to get updates started more regularly, now that my school situation is a lot more stable and I've finally dug my muse out of her hidey-hole.
> 
> In the meantime, I'd like to introduce you to what I imagine Monitor looking like: the [Ranger-class missile cruiser](https://battlestargalacticadeadlock.gamepedia.com/File:Ranger.png) from Battlestar Galactica: Deadlock. Just imagine it matte-black with the Stars and Stripes and the [Jack of the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_of_the_United_States) on it somewhere.


End file.
